


Leaf House

by aebleskiver



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Found Family, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Post-Canon, all it is is hobie trying to be a good gay uncle, anyways i clearly need therapy, i guess this is sort of a coming-out narrative but not in the obvious sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:53:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29013882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aebleskiver/pseuds/aebleskiver
Summary: They were good boys, Hobie often found himself thinking—even though, objectively, he knew that to not be strictly true.Or: Theo and Hobie finally have a conversation.
Relationships: James “Hobie” Hobart/Welton "Welty" Blackwell, Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	Leaf House

**Author's Note:**

> funny how donna tartt wrote a whole book about gay people and didn't notice!
> 
> title from the song by Animal Collective

“How much is this thing worth, Potter?” Boris asked, slinging a leg over the side of an imitation Chippendale armchair stacked in the twilight of the back of the store. “One hundred thousand? Two?”

“Not even close,” snorted Theo, counting out the cash drawer. 

“Good,” Boris said. “It’s too fussy. All this little filigree shite.”

“It’s not filigree.”

“Whatever,” said Boris. “Still too gay.”

“Boris,” said Theo. “I have some bad news for you, if you’re worried about being gay—”

At this, there was the sound of something crashing; Theo barked out a laugh. Hobie, coming up the stairs from the basement, caught sight only of the aftermath—a tossed lampshade (not one of any value) and Theo trying to wriggle his way out of a headlock. 

“I’m going up to Union Square,” Hobie said, turning an amused eye on the scene. “Either of you need anything?”

They unwound from each other quickly—Theo nonplussed, Boris smiling with joyous, transparent secrecy, both of them pink around the edges. 

“No, we’re fine,” Theo said, turning back to the register deliberately. “Thanks.”

Hobie faced the door while he wound a scarf around his neck and secured two buttons of his overcoat. Behind him, he could hear the two of them murmuring, and then another brisk, sharp laugh from Theo—a noise Hobie only ever heard him make in Boris’s presence. He turned back to wave and saw them standing a careful distance away from each other, the delight of the secret still evident on both their faces. 

On the sidewalk, he only made it a few steps before a professor trotting down out of the Lillian Vernon house called to him, and they slipped easily into a ten minute conversation about the closing of an old diner on Sixth Avenue, a staple of the neighborhood, that was to be replaced by a condo block. It began to drizzle, staining the brownstones a darker red at the corners. Hobie glanced back at the shop, wondering if it was worth it to return for an umbrella, and saw that Theo had turned on a few of the lamps in the gallery, casting an umber glow that radiated out into the darkening afternoon. And inside the glow he saw them, behind the counter again, Boris with his arms around Theo’s waist, Theo leaning forward into him. It was déjà vu, suddenly—if he squinted then it was another time, another pair, and he was outside looking in on himself through the narrowing slipstream of time, a young Welty pressing against him as they closed the shop on some long ago evening. Hobie looked away quickly. 

Boris Pavlikovsky clearly went to great lengths to be liked; it was for this reason that Hobie couldn’t quite muster the aversion to him that should have been natural. Instrumental in some vague criminal enterprise, very nearly responsible for the death of a beloved cultural artifact, and until quite recently solidly addicted to the hard stuff, among other things—this collection of facts should have laid a strong foundation of wariness, at the very least. But all that Hobie seemed able to summon at Sunday supper above the shop or over drinks in one of the wine bars in Chelsea was the same paternal affection he applied to Theo—the both of them preened under it, luxuriated in it like feral animals tearing into a strip steak. They were good boys, Hobie often found himself thinking as he walked home down Fifth Avenue, or cleared away the dishes after they’d left—even though, objectively, he knew that to not be strictly true. 

Trying to be good; perhaps that was closer to the truth. Two years ago, Boris had shown up on Theo’s doorstep, rung out from a week spent detoxing in the penthouse of a SoHo hotel. He was abandoning whatever nebulous and nefarious business it was that he was involved in. He was getting off the worst of the drugs, he said. And he was settling in New York, if Theo would have him. Turning thirty had scared both of them straight, Theo said later, though he smirked at his own wording—a private smirk, as though Hobie wouldn’t appreciate the joke. 

Now the two of them were installed in a loft on the Lower East Side, more or less sober, Theo still manning the sales side of things at Hobart & Blackwell and Boris doing something that Hobie had the sense was still illegal but was perhaps less dangerous than whatever he was up to before. He did not inquire into this subject, for their sake and his own. He knew that he had a world, a tight circle in which he lived and worked, and that there were things outside of it over which he had no control. Boris existed on a border, one foot in the circle and one foot in the ocean outside of it; he knew that water from that ocean had sloshed into his circle before. There was no holding back the tide, if it were to come in again—he was left having to trust Theo’s judgment, which was not without risk. Risk being the price of loving someone, he knew, and with that thought he could always put a lid on the subject, turn off the bedside lamp, turn over into the mustiness of his bedroom and sleep. More than a decade, now, of sleeping alone, and the jolt at the sight of the cold, unused pillow beside his own did not fade. 

Things had been different, when Hobie first arrived in the city all those years ago, but not terribly so. He was neither the first nor the last to wash up in New York, escaping from some intolerant corner, some other untenable world. His feet hit the pavement and he knew that he could carve something out here; this was something he could mold. He had had many reasons to hate his father, to fear him, to run from him, but in the end it came down to a question of flexibility: the tensile strength of materials, of a life. Rosewood would contort, would do much of what you asked it to with minimal complaint. And then it would snap. 

But even in New York, he had not stepped completely out of the shade. He and Welty were running a business; they were convincing the old and conservative to spend thousands upon thousands on their wares. There were choices made for the sake of appearances. Separate bedrooms, if they had guests, the illusion of “Welty’s bedroom” maintained even after his death. The requirement for the word “business” to always precede the word “partner.” All these little tricks of language and reference; life as a vanishing act, a misdirection, a bait-and-switch before the audience. Hobie had never shaken off the feeling of being watched; it had followed him from Albany and it would follow him to the grave. He could bury himself in the work, and that helped—he could believe, for intervals, that his product was all that mattered, that if what he made was good enough then the masses would ignore all else. But it was wrong, to want Welty ignored; to want their life erased. Wrong to try to erase his footsteps in the dirt in the same second as he made them. He knew this, and yet his talent for eliding himself never waned. 

Theo imitated this pattern in parts and defied it in others; Hobie wished, sometimes, that they could speak candidly about it, wished that he could dispense some sage advice; the maintenance of a lineage of information seemed essential. But this was a subject he had trained himself to omit. He had purposefully made the words alien to him, exoticized the facts of his own life, separated sign from signifier from signified. He had filed himself away into an unreachable file cabinet, and then dropkicked the cabinet off a cliff. 

Tuesday night, Theo invited him for dinner at the new loft off Bowery—an old tenement converted with the help of glass and whitewash and slate gray floor tiles into something slick and new. The fact that Theo had filled it with antiques felt both ironic and like a necessary reclamation; a nod toward some New York that preceded all of them. Boris popped the cork on a wine bottle and said, “Fedya has invited you because he wants to show off the fact that he has finally learned how to use oven. A miracle.”

“We’re all very proud,” Hobie said, watching Theo scowl down into a pyrex dish. 

“I’m not convinced this is going to be edible,” Theo said. “It definitely has edible things in it but that’s all I can promise.”

After the meal, Theo gave him the official tour, starting in the living room with the vaguely Affleck settee and high-backed chairs around a smooth cherry wood table and then through to a kitchen which, in contrast, was a maze of smooth white cabinetry and quartz countertop. “I know it seems a little sterile,” Theo said. “Compared to what you’re used to.”

“It’s nice,” Hobie said. “I can see the appeal of clean lines.”

“We’re doing our best to fill it up with junk as soon as possible,” Boris offered, leaning against the counter with a smirk. “Hitting up flea market every Sunday. Potter says I have good eye for garbage.”

“Boris thinks anything manufactured before 2005 is an antique,” said Theo, with a fond role of the eyes, and led them upstairs to the loft. The dark wood four poster bed shrank the room noticeably, but Hobie was distracted by the bright inflow of light from the floor to ceiling glass wall facing the street. A _Rear Window_ -like panorama of activity greeted him from the lighted windows in the high rise across the avenue. A couple watched a flat screen in a monochrome white living room; a girl sat hunched over a desk in a bedroom lit green with string lights. He could see them all; with a turn of the head, they could see him. The hairs on the back of his neck raised and wavered. 

Theo was saying something about the grain of the wood on one of the bedposts—definitely not original, didn’t Hobie think so? “But the other three are convincing enough,” Theo said, shrugging. 

“Christ alive,” said Hobie, and finally Theo looked up at him, confused. With effort, Hobie unglued his eyes from the window. “It’s a decent reproduction,” he managed to say, sliding a hand up the bedpost in question. “I do hope you didn’t overpay.”

“Of course not,” Theo said, still eyeing him intently. “What kind of salesman would I be if I couldn’t get myself a good deal?”

Hobie let out a chuckle at this, or something like one. When Theo led him back downstairs, he masked his sigh of a relief with a cough. 

Or maybe this was the problem: he was not sure what advice he’d give Theo, if he had the courage to give it. He was disturbed by what might come out of his mouth if he opened it. After the divorce with Kitsey had gone through and Theo had gone back to living above the shop, he’d searched for the words to comfort him, and found a few, but mainly what had helped was work—the two of them in the basement, surrounded by the fragments of the past, rebuilding. That was before Boris had resurfaced in New York, before Theo had become something approximating sober, before he started smiling again—or perhaps like he never really had before. And the only advice Hobie could produce, through it all, was this: that things would be easier for Theo, probably, if he’d stayed married to Kitsey. 

He didn’t say it. He had that much respect for himself—knew to swallow it back when Theo came to him looking lost. Kitsey, with her disinterest in Theo’s private affairs and her easy connections to the kind of clientele Hobart & Blackwell were always looking to cultivate. A respectable woman who would not embarrass him or allow him to embarrass her. It was one kind of life; in another time, it might have been the only tolerable option out of many intolerable ones. 

But still—what cynical, unlovely advice to give a young person. What disgusting hypocrisy for him to be the one to give it. Silence was better, if that was all he had to offer on the subject. 

Welty would have known what to say. Would have guilelessly and charmingly coaxed Theo into a dialogue, would have let him know that he didn’t have to hide from him, that even the pretense of a secret wasn’t necessary. Because that was all it was, now—a strange formality that existed on this subject alone. He had never spoken to Theo about the nature of he and Welty’s relationship, and yet he suspected Theo knew, just as Hobie knew of him and Boris while still maintaining the illusion of obliviousness. There was a dishonesty to this, or maybe even a kind of disrespect. That they should live side by side and let this essential fact remain unacknowledged seemed to be a model that belonged to another time, and he had no excuse besides his own human weakness to account for it. 

Sunday nights were when the flat felt particularly empty. The work was still the only way he knew how to deal with it. It had been there for him once Pippa was spirited away to Texas, when Welty’s absence had finally collided with him fully. There were still days when the memory of their last morning together hit with such force that he found himself sitting down, abruptly—on benches in strange parks, on the floor of the workshop, on railings leading down to the subway. An entirely unremarkable morning, yet each detail of it had been lifted into sanctity, deified, lovingly restored with every pass of his mind over the well-worn elements: Welty slipping from his arms in the predawn light, the smell of the rain on the damp windowsill (the window eternally propped open an inch—Welty liked the wave of fresh air, the fragrance of Tenth Street usually palatable enough), the brisk goodbye kiss over breakfast before Welty and Pippa had embarked uptown for an audition. And that was it. He knew he had a lifetime of memories to shuffle through and yet it all boiled down to those last few minutes, the split second that lingered between his last view of Welty’s lopsided shoulders and next moment when he was gone, turning the corner out of the room, for all intents and purposes already dead. There had been no premonition, no sense of impending doom. His mind was already on the Queen Anne chest he needed to varnish in the basement, Welty’s half-finished cup of coffee going cold in his peripheral vision. 

In the chaos of After, it was Pippa’s injuries that had helpfully consumed him, and then Theo’s presence, too—another tragedy as a kind of balm, another celestial pinprick of grief that he could focus his eyes on the inky black of his own pain. And then, when Theo was gone, all that remained was the work. The work that said, _alright, this is how you’re going to survive. This is the last thing left. Alright._

But now, this Sunday, he could hear footsteps on the basement stairs. The familiar click of Theo’s oxfords—he knew without having to look up from the clamp he was securing to a bookshelf, the chemical smell of the glue light and sharp in his nose. 

“I do hope you’re not working on your day off,” Hobie said.

“And what is it that you’re doing, then?” Theo asked, eyeing him with amusement. 

“This?” Hobie said, feigning innocence. “This is hardly work.”

Theo circled the project, lying a light finger on one edge of the top shelf. “What is it?”

“A bookshelf,” Hobie said. “So Boris doesn’t have to keep his books in a stack on your bedroom floor.”

He had seen the stack of Russian classics lying forlorn in the loft and felt something had to be done. A good idea for a Christmas present, though Boris was an easy man to shop for—he would have been delighted by a used tissue if a vaguely father-shaped man had presented it to him with loving intention. 

Theo looked long and hard at the bookshelf, then up at Hobie, a cautious smile migrating across his face. “He’ll love that,” Theo said, the softness of his voice punctured by a gentle laugh. 

Hobie shrugged modestly, digging a fingernail into an imperfection in the grain. Theo said, “Actually, I came down here to ask you about something. Do you know someone named Elizabeth Van Houtum?”

Hobie frowned, eyes drifting to the ceiling while he searched his memory. “Older woman, yes? Apartment on Riverside? I think Welty helped furnish her dining room but it must have been a few decades since then. Didn’t she move out west eventually?”

“To Nevada,” Theo said. “Suburb in Henderson, to be closer to grandkids. She died last year, unfortunately, but her children say that her will bequeathes all her furniture back to Hobart & Blackwell.”

Hobie raised his eyebrows. “How strange.”

But as soon as he said it he knew that he was wrong, that there was nothing at all strange about it. People felt seen by Welty, grew easily attached to him; dozens of old ladies across Manhattan had left him bits and pieces in their estates out of fondness and loyalty. Hobie, of course, had agreed to abandon Albany after barely one full day of knowing him—it still seemed an enormous stroke of luck that Welty had felt anything for him in return. 

“They want us to come out there and have a look at what she’s got before they ship it,” Theo added. “They seemed a little vexed that she had apparently written in this caveat without their approval; I told them we’d buy anything we wanted and let them sell the rest.”

“That sounds fair,” Hobie said, and then: “They want us to come to Nevada? Both of us?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want,” Theo said. “But I thought it might be a show of good faith. And I still trust your eye more than mine.”

Hobie paused, trying to picture it—he left New York so rarely these days it felt dissonant and foreign to insert his self-image into any other locale, a kind of copy-and-paste accident. Theo had talked about the desert before, had explained the reality of the big sky phenomenon not with awe but with fear. How you can be buried, not in sand but in air. How a sun can stare back. 

“And Boris is coming,” Theo said. “He and I haven’t been back in years, not since we left. He says you should come too.”

This addendum seemed unlikely, though not impossible. Boris, for all his garrulousness—his shoulders rolled back and open, his eyes wide and animated—still had the ability to surprise, suggesting that he played his cards a little closer to his chest than was obvious. Hobie could not fathom what had connected himself and Nevada in Boris’s head.

“I’ll think about it,” Hobie said. 

Which was how he found himself in an airport cab on a January afternoon in Las Vegas with the desert, white and cold and blinding in the sun, opening up before them as they screamed through six barren lanes of interstate away from McCarran airport. Boris and Theo occupied the backseat. Both had gone strangely silent once the plane had begun its final descent and the sand had spread out beneath the wing; Hobie, sitting closest to the aisle, had watched them crane their necks to see past the extended flaps, their rapt gazes aimed at familiar ground. 

Now, he watched them in the rearview mirror—their stillness, the set of lines around Theo’s mouth, the way Boris was biting impassively at a thumbnail. Hobie tightened his scarf against the chill, fiddled with a cufflink. He was unused to a quiet Boris. Theo’s moods were easy to track; he’d been gauging Theo’s various silences for a decade and a half now with dexterity. But Boris existed in such a state of perpetual motion that he realized only now, in its absence, how entirely Boris was marked by his kineticism.

“Does it look the same as you remember?” Hobie asked, glancing back at Theo.

“Exactly the same,” Theo deadpanned, eyes on the stripmalls filling in the expanse around them. 

The furniture was a welcome distraction. Decently well-preserved in the dry climate, of medium rarity and just bland enough to be appealing to the average customer—exactly the kind of pieces Theo could sell, with minimal persuasion necessary, to the wealthy casual collector who might wander into the gallery. And a few required a little restoration, enough to keep Hobie interested, or at least busy; he had long since lost the ability to tell the difference. He ran a hand over the table top of the dining set and felt the phantom touch of Welty on the same surface, discerning a beat of warmth even in this frozen, arid place. 

The family didn’t have much to say. Shipping and payment were arranged and the business was over before dinnertime, but their flight out wasn’t until the next afternoon. Waiting at the curb for the return of the cab, Hobie watched the sun decay on the far-off horizon, a rich orange slipping into gelid blue night. The wind sloughed sand between the laces of his brogues. He noticed Theo, who had put on a passable salesman face during the dealings with the family, had now slipped into blankness. Boris was looking at his phone. He glanced at Theo and said cautiously, “Would it be problem for you if I met with Mr. Silver tomorrow, before we leave?”

Theo squinted at him. “You still talk to him?”

“No,” Boris said, “But I told him I would be in town. He wants to know how I’m doing. Good man, I always told you.”

Theo sniffed. “You and I have different definitions of ‘good.’”

“No, we don’t,” said Boris, without hesitation. He turned to Hobie. “Mr. Silver is old friend of mine. Like father to me. Actually, I bet you and him would get along!”

At this, Theo put a hand on Boris’s shoulder and sent him a silencing look. Hobie decided not to ask. 

In the morning, Hobie woke just after dawn, confused. He slid a hand over the hotel’s slick microfiber sheets, trying to recall why the light in his bedroom was brighter and harsher than it had ever been. He searched for landmarks, and found his suitcase on the ottoman at his feet, the edge of a neatly folded silk button-up just visible. He was not awake, not quite, and in that liminal waystation in which he rested he felt the presence of Welty beside him, stronger than he had in years. The depression of bed springs, the warmth of breath against his cheek, an arm laid across him in sleep. How strange to find him here—he must have moved, or maybe it was vacation, yes, and Hobie had finally finished his work and come to meet him, though why they had chosen Vegas as their destination of choice was inscrutable, even in the dreamscape—

Theo had shown him yesterday how to set an alarm on his phone; it trilled at eight and Hobie pulled himself from this sludge of memory and invention and stepped back into the world, into the slippers he had brought with him from New York and set demurely next to the hotel bed in anticipation of the smooth cold of the laminate floor in the morning. At breakfast, both Theo and Boris looked vaguely hungover—or maybe just sullen, sleep-deprived, wilting beneath the dissonant combination of sun and wind. Hobie had never been very good at identifying the difference between when Theo was actually _on_ something versus when he was just feeling particularly weighed down by all that had attached itself to his back over the years. 

“So what’s the plan for today, gentlemen?” Hobie asked, after convincing the waitress, blonde and taut-skinned and smiling blankly, to bring him an extra soft-boiled egg. 

Boris and Theo exchanged a look of perturbation at this invocation of the day ahead. It had been agreed on last night—they wanted to go back to Desert End Road. A kind of pilgrimage. They said Hobie didn’t have to come along if he wasn’t up for it but he couldn’t think of anything better to do and it had been clear, from Theo’s expression, that he didn’t want Hobie to decline. 

“Boris is meeting Mr. Silver for brunch,” Theo said neutrally. “And then meeting us at my dad’s old place when he’s done.”

Hobie looked to Boris, who quirked a vaguely amused eyebrow and shrugged. He once again felt that he should say something—something as simple, maybe, as reminding Theo that he did not have to venture back into the past if he didn’t want to. There was no obligation to bring things full circle. Theo, however, was looking intently down at the remains of an English muffin on his plate, as though aware that this advice was brewing and seeking to avoid it. 

They parted ways on the curb in front of the hotel: Boris into the gleaming black Suburban that had mysteriously arrived for him, kissing Theo on the cheek and waving with effortful cheer, and then a cab summoned by the front desk clerk for Hobie and Theo, with a warning that the fare out to the edge of town would be predictably atrocious. Theo picked at a shred of lint on his Fair Isle sweater and said that it would not be a problem. 

Then the desert was shooting by again at preposterous speed as the cab dodged fluidly through five lane intersections, bounding past strip malls doused in the same creamy shade of beige, between housing development enclaves marked incongruously by their hard-fought patches of disconcerting kelly green lawn. The more he saw of it, the less Hobie felt like he had a grip on this place—it blended into a palette of colors around him, a watercolor disassembling into its component parts. Serial numbers filed off, fingerprints wiped away with a damp cloth. Theo said, eyes pointed out the window, “This area has changed a little, I think,” and in his voice was an unmistakable note of relief. 

The house itself was at the end of a cul-de-sac so dismal that Hobie had to labor to conceal his shock. He looked to Theo, searching for a reaction to either mimic or respond to; the expression on Theo’s face provided no cues to work from. The boy paid the cab driver, wordlessly handing over a card; they stepped out onto the sandy pavement into the slant of midmorning sun and were met with a dead-eyed stucco facade and an expanse behind it of land so empty it resisted ocular interpretation. A house at the end of the world. 

“Theo,” Hobie said, and finally Theo looked at him. A moment passed in silence, like a beat of mourning at a funeral. Pew after pew of heads turned down towards folded hands.

“I wonder if we need a key,” said Theo. 

Hobie’s eyes ran over all the cracks in the terra cotta, the fraying and tearing at the edges where the wind and sand had begun to pull at the seams of the structure. Some of the windows were still intact, though fogged with dust. Theo mounted the stoop and tried the knob; it broke off in his hand and the door swung open to reveal a pile of unopened mail lying in the foyer. The smell of musty carpet drifted out. 

“Jesus Christ,” said Theo, stepping forward into the house without hesitation. Hobie followed, noting a foreclosure notice to be among the envelopes littering the floor. This house at the end of the world: owned by no one, inhabited by dust. He looked ahead to Theo, his shoulders disappearing into the darkness of the living room, reentering the primordial nothing of childhood. To emerge from here felt miraculous; to not have been consumed by this inkwell of a house and the endless pull of the earth outside of it. Theo appeared again, moving in the kitchen now, between pools of golden sun, stepping in and out of shadow with each click of his shoes. 

“I can’t believe this place still exists,” Theo said, brushing a hand through the dust collected on the countertops. 

“How do you mean?” Hobie asked. But he knew, already, without knowing—the loose temporality of this place was evident. A new thing turned old. And then the desert, old beyond comprehension, pulling at the periphery. 

In the living room, furniture remained, sun-bleached and sagging. Magazines curling like papyrus on the ringed surface of a coffee table. A sliding door led out to a cracked patio and an empty pool and Theo stopped here, his feet perched on the brick edge of the hole, digging his hands into the pockets of his slacks. 

“Theo,” Hobie said, squinting when he emerged into the sun. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? None of this was your fault.”

Hobie knew this, but still the regret felt truthful—someone owed Theo an apology for this half-life, this period of desolation. In the moment, he thought himself a suitable enough conduit. 

Theo shook his head. “Did I ever thank you for sending me that Saint-Exupéry book while I was out here?”

“I’m sure you did.”

“It wasn’t all bad, you know,” Theo said. “I do have some happy memories out here. I met Boris.”

“Still, with your fathers like that—” Hobie let himself trail off, eyes on the horizon. “And so much time fending for yourselves.”

Theo shrugged. “We had each other,” he said, casually enough, and in the next second he was crying. 

Hobie moved toward instinctually, resting a big hand on his shoulder, pulling him closer when he felt the muscles relent under his grip. Theo fell into the hug. He could have been a teenager again, scoured and scarred by the world around him, a look of perpetual dismay and bafflement on his face like when he turned up at the shop bearing Welty’s ring. Welty’s last act, and not even a conscious one, to return the ring to Hobie in the temple of their life together. A final gift; a last, parting declaration of devotion. 

“We weren’t always together, Boris and I,” Theo was saying, once he’d recovered enough to speak. He seemed as surprised as Hobie at the words falling from his mouth. “We were just friends. Kind of. Just boys being boys, I thought,” he added, wincing at the expression. “But honestly I tried not to give it too much thought at all.”

Hobie nodded at this, feeling the stinging twinge of familiarity. Theo was sitting on the edge of the pool, still sniffling mildly; Hobie had found one of the sturdier looking deck chairs and sat on the edge of it stiffly, feeling the ache of the wind in his joints even with the sun high and bright overhead. 

Theo dug a palm into his left eye socket and continued, “And then he popped up again out of nowhere. Like fate or something. And you know how I was back then—really lost. Pretty far gone, most of the time.”

“I remember.”

“And I won’t pretend that it clicked immediately. The painting—I was so mad at him. And the Kitsey thing, too; I felt like I couldn’t let down Mrs. Barbour. But after Amsterdam, right before he put me on a plane back to New York, he said—” here, Theo did a relatively accurate imitation of Boris’s hybrid accent—“‘Don’t be stranger, Potter.’ And then he kissed me.”

Hobie hummed in understanding. Theo looked down at his own hands. 

“And when he did I thought, oh, this is why I survived. Or, this is how I’m _going_ to survive. It felt right—different than when we were kids but also the same. But I still went back and married Kitsey and I guess it could’ve been worse but it obviously wasn’t enough. But I knew why, at least, which was better than all the years before when I felt completely fucking unmoored and couldn’t parse why, or refused to.”

“But you made it through to the other side,” Hobie said, watching Theo’s legs swing out over the empty pool. “There’s something to be said for that.”

Theo nodded, albeit reluctantly. “Being here, it’s hard to believe that—well, you know. Feels far away and not that far at all. Did you ever go back to Albany, after you left?”

Hobie paused at this, startled by the question. There was a part of him that thought he might make it through this conversation with his autonomic silence on the subject of himself intact. He said, “Yes, but rarely. Welty encouraged it. He said clean breaks are never really clean. The past always comes back.” Hobie sighed. “As you see.”

But Theo was still looking at him, the curiosity in his expression unbridled. There was no stepping backwards into the darkness; to recuse himself again would be a betrayal. Hobie said, “When I first left Albany it wasn’t because—because of what you think. I was angry at my father for a lot of things. I didn’t understand entirely what he thought was so wrong with me.”

The strength of the sun forced his eyes downward. All the easier to avoid Theo’s gaze.

“Welty caught the nature of the situation with one glance, of course, but he knew I had to figure it out on my own. And I did, once I was in the city. Things clicked, like you said. And there were others, in the early years, but at the end of the day it was Welty. Always him.” To his horror, his throat tightened. He squinted up at the weightless blue of the sky, swallowed, breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. 

“How did you know?” Theo asked. 

“Lots of little things,” Hobie said, though this wasn’t entirely the answer. He knew the moment—could still remember the way the light had slanted into the kitchen. A Thursday morning. But he thought he might want to keep this for himself; a memory that he and Welty alone could share, that would pass into the ether when he was gone. A thing made immortal when it became unattached from human memory. 

He was saved from evading the question further by Boris crashing through the living room. “Fedya, you’re not going to fucking believe this, my house—gone! Fucking bulldozed! Thank God, or thank city planner of Las Vegas, I don’t know which.”

He stopped abruptly on the threshold of the sliding door when he caught sight of Theo—glasses off, face blotched with red, one of Hobie’s handkerchiefs still clutched in his fist. “Everything okay?” Boris asked, stepping onto the sunbaked cement. 

“Yeah,” Theo said, climbing to his feet. “Just reminiscing.”

Boris snorted at this. “Sorry to hear that.”

“What did Silver have to say?”

“He told me to tell you he’s sorry about your father,” Boris said. “I asked him if Xandra ever came through town again but he hasn’t heard a thing from her since she headed for Reno—same thing as me! Disappeared. Whatever. Would probably have nasty shit to say if she saw us now, yes? I think she always suspected—”

Boris broke off, gaze darting toward Hobie. Hobie did his best to open his face, to not avert his eyes. Thought of Welty, and smiled. Theo glanced between them and reached for Boris’s hand, pulling him out of the shade of the looming house. Boris raised an eyebrow at this display but accepted the realignment without question. 

“Anyways,” said Boris. “I am remembering I hate this fucking place.”

“I was telling Hobie that it wasn’t all bad,” Theo said. “How else would we have ever met each other?”

“Yes, yes, sometimes bad breeds good, dancing wheel of chance, fate intervenes—fuck it! But I want to focus on good stuff,” Boris said, and then flung an arm out to encompass the scene around them—broken umbrellas fluttering in the wind, the meshing of sand and crumbling concrete, the fearsome sun. “Not on all this shit.”

Theo tipped his chin to acknowledge this. “Fair enough.”

“I know I’m right!” Boris broke from Theo’s grasp and offered a hand to Hobie, heaving him to his feet. “Come, come, we’re going to miss flight.”

“We’re not anywhere near missing the flight,” Theo said, brow furrowing. 

“Yes, but I want time to eat at Wolfgang Puck in airport,” Boris said, turning impatiently back toward the house. 

“Boris,” said Theo. “You’re a fucking lunatic.”

For Easter, Pippa and Everett hopped the pond with the kids in tow, and Hobie spent the day after their arrival ensconced in the kitchen, slaving over a temperamental roast and an assortment of side dishes. Everett took the kids up to the children’s museum on the Upper West Side, leaving the apartment in relative peace as Pippa moved between rooms, updating Hobie on all the minutiae of her daily life, of Everett’s, of Juliet and Welton’s in primary school and daycare, respectively. Punctuated it all with her lilting laugh, which always spread so easily from her chest into Hobie’s own. 

During lulls in business downstairs Theo appeared in the kitchen, offering an extra pair of hands to marinate the asparagus or another set of eyes to gauge the rise of the dough in the oven. Theo, with something approaching nonchalance, told Pippa about the new loft, about the highlights from an old Kingsley Amis novel he was working through, about Boris’s quest last Christmas through every grocery store in Brighton Beach for the exact rye bread he wanted to pair with the borscht for which he’d already spent days boiling down beef bones into broth. Pippa laughed at this, and Hobie glanced over at the two of them—Theo’s jaw was still set tight, the way it always was around Pippa, but he was holding himself differently. Something unwound in his shoulders, maybe, or in the way he crossed his legs when he sat at the table. Welty would have been able to pinpoint the transformation better, had always been so aware of the shifting social currents in a room, happy to fill in Hobie on the way home about all the subterranean allegiances and treacheries they had encountered around some uptown dinner table. They would laugh about it, delight in the silliness of the intrigue. Exchange knowing glances at their next outing, eyes meeting across a sea of other people. They had only ever had one conversation, a decades-long beast of one that had passed seamlessly through every topic and train of thought, and he still couldn’t believe that it was over. Even now, Hobie wanted to look over his shoulder, raise an eyebrow at Welty and nod in Theo’s direction. _What do you make of that?_

Theo disappeared at the end of the work day to change for dinner; he would return with Boris in an hour, in time for Hobie to have everything out of the oven. Pippa, hovering in the doorway after he’d left, said, “Theo seems...better, don’t you think?”

Hobie pricked a few photogenic sprigs of parsley off the bundle he kept in a mug in the fridge. “Best I’ve seen him.”

“I’m glad he has someone,” Pippa said, something melancholy gathering in her eyes. “Someone real.”

Hobie straightened, turning to smile his agreement in the waning light of the day. Everett reappeared with the kids shortly thereafter, and then Theo with Boris, who seemed delighted by the chaos of delivering dishes to the dining room with the children and a geriatric Popchyk underfoot. The table was set, with festive crackers placed next to the utensils; Juliet unleashed hers with a sharp _pop_ the moment she sat down and placed the paper crown inside it over her red hair, which had been done up in a messy French plait for the occasion. The others took their seats, lit by candles and a few dusty lamps in the dark warmth of the room, the air filling with the patter of their voices. 

Hobie retreated once more into the kitchen to retrieve the rolls, wrapping them in a clean hand towel and placing the bundle inside a light brown wicker basket. What remained of the sun had the whitish quality that it took on for the crispest of spring days; it leaked over the countertops, over the ark and the animals arranged on the shelf, in the same pattern that it had for years. Time compressed, as it so often did—the past becoming as real and true and present as the smell of the still-warm loaf beneath his hands—and Hobie stood in the same spot as he always had, bearing witness. This was, probably, the only form of anything resembling advice he could realistically give Theo, in the end—his continued existence in space, the persistence of his body through time and outside of it, as proof of his and others’ passage across the earth. He peered into the other room through the overlapping doorways, eyes wandering over the animated faces, and offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Welty, towards wherever he may be, knowing that none of this would exist without him. 

_How did you know?_ Theo had asked him, and the answer rushed through him like the wake of a speeding cab. He traced the tunnel of his mind back to that Thursday morning, all those years ago. This same kitchen, this same light. He’d just broken up with a luthier who worked out of a basement in Alphabet City; eighteen months down the drain. He’d rolled into the flat after a night spent arguing and negotiating and crying followed by a long walk in the early morning cold, feeling wrung dry, feeling ready to collapse but still too furious for bed and there was Welty, leaning against the counter, sun on his face and shoulders and hands, who listened, and told a few stories of his own, and then made him a cup of tea. 

Hobie had looked down into the greenish gray swirl in his mug. Sighed, shoulders bunching. “I don’t know how I’m going to get past this.”

Welty gave him a look—a long one. “You’ll survive,” he said and, indeed, he did.


End file.
